Amy Gustine took my request for writing a post on something to do with short stories and ran with it--a fantastic essay on time vs. length within the short story form. She dips into various works from some other great writers and I think when you get around to reading her own collection, You Should Pity Us Instead, you'll be able to realize it's something she's thought about for a long time. There are wise words below--soak them up.
The Long-Clock Story: guest post for Short Story Month
When I first started writing short stories, I took for granted that the length of a story in terms of pages would be closely related to the length of fictional time covered, the story’s “clock” as some writers, including Antonya Nelson, have termed it. In other words, I assumed a story that takes place over one afternoon is going to be shorter than one that takes place over a month. I assumed, without being aware of it, that short stories couldn’t cover years. Having read some of the masters, like Chekhov, I can’t account for this blind spot. Obviously I wasn’t taking the time to analyze stories’ time clocks or authors’ strategies for managing them.
In addition, I made another assumption, this one having to do with Freytag’s pyramid. The famous dramatic outline of inciting incident, complicating action, climax, falling action and denouement led me to think in the most literal terms about one incident leading immediately to another. Since Freytag’s pyramid has its roots in Greek drama this shouldn’t be surprising. Plays and films usually do have short time clocks. Moreover, I thought of the events that take place as a series of causes and affects. Freytag’s pyramid certainly promotes this view, but there is also E.M. Forester’s famous definition of “story” and “plot” to back it up: “We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
In fact, most plays and films do have tightly designed cause and effect plots as well as short time clocks. So do most genre pieces, such as mysteries, thrillers and romances. But literary fiction isn’t confined by time or the physical world like plays and films, and it doesn’t have to satisfy genre conventions of cause and effect. Instead, it is infinitely malleable, leaping forward and back in time and space, rushing through decades in a sentence or pausing on a moment for a hundred pages. It can travel within the world or limit itself to a single mind. In the broadest sense, Fretyag’s pyramid and Forester’s notions of cause and effect as the principal foundations of plot remain valid, but mistaking them for structural or temporal molds will shackle a writer.
The first step to removing the shackles is examining how other writers operate without them. Following are several stories that cover long periods of time, which I’m interpreting as at least a year, but typically far more. The stories also approach cause and effect in subtle, complex ways sometimes so much so that they defy plotting onto Freytag’s pyramid at all.
In Joan Silber’s collection Ideas of Heaven all five stories are long, coming in between thirty and fifty pages each, they take place over decades and they are dominated by summary rather than scene. In other words most or all of the events are related in condensed form rather than depicted in detail as if they were unfolding in real time. In some stories, there is nothing but summary; not a single event is fully dramatized from beginning to end. In others, such as the opener “My Shape,” there is one series of events which is fully dramatized, but the rest of the story is summary with only bits of dialogue and action embedded.
The primary way Silber makes so much summary compelling is to use self-reflective, first-person narrators. This lends a confessional feel to the stories, compelling us to listen because the character is talking directly to us. We aren’t merely hearing about them. The sense that someone is choosing to be honest about deeply personal events and feelings makes the summary feel alive and dramatic in a way third-person summary can’t leverage. Lest anyone think first person is constraining (spoiler-alert), in one of the stories the narrator dies at the end. How can a dead character be telling us their story? The only answer I have is to refer back to the infinite malleability of art that takes place in our minds rather than the physical world.
Another notable feature of Silber’s stories is that it’s difficult to map them over the Freytag pyramid. In many, when you think you’ve reached the climax, and surely the story will wrap up, Silber pushes forward, and things go on. In other words, the stories feel like life. Certainly there are causes and effects, but both are varied and overlapping, the implications complex and distributed over time. In a Silber story it can take years for a cause to give rise to its effect. Helpfully, Silber herself has given us a clue to her thinking on this matter. In her book The Art of Time in Fiction she observes that stories with a long clock substitute time passing “for high action: duration gives weight to the quotidian.”
Annie’s Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” takes the opposite approach to handling an extended time period. Covering almost twenty years, the story is written third-person and dominated by fully-dramatized scenes. Proulx limits summary, using it mainly to stitch together the consequential moments, explaining what happens between them when it is is absolutely necessary. This is a technique that most short-clock stories also use, but in these the summary only has to relate what happens in intervening hours or days. Proulx’s more challenging task is to summarize years. In some cases, she does it in a phrase: “The fourth summer since Brokeback Mountain came on…” In other cases, she uses several sentences: “They were no longer young men with all of it before them. Jack had filled out through the shoulders and hams, Ennis stayed as lean as a clothes-pole…A benign growth appeared on his eyelid and gave it a drooping appearance, a broken nose healed crooked.” Here Proulx uses the physical changes to the men’s appearance to provide a sense of time passing. Other writers have used similar techniques by detailing the changing appearance of a landscape or a character’s living arrangements.
The one exception to Proulx’s chronological narrative is the first two paragraphs of the story, which are set in italicized print. These paragraphs portray a scene that takes place after the rest of the story’s events have already occurred. In addition, the scene is written in present tense while the rest of the story is written in past tense. At the end of the story, the last scene implicitly invokes these first two paragraphs, which now take on much greater meaning, heightening the pathos of the protagonist’s last thought. Another notable feature of the story is its handling of point of view. Written third-person limited, most of the events are told via Ennis’s point of view, but late in the story a few critical pieces of information are told from Jack’s perspective. The use of a new point of view deep in the story is something workshop participants often challenge, another reason “Brokeback Mountain” is a great example of how to break free of strict cause and effect models.
John Updike’s story “Made in Heaven” offers a different set of twists on the long-clock story. Unlike Silber’s and Proulx’s stories, it covers forty-five years in a mere 14 pages (about 5,000 words). In this economical footprint, Updike relates the story of a marriage, from the couple’s meeting to the wife’s death. He uses third-person from the husband’s point of view. Compared to Silber’s stories, whose kernels are more difficult to state in a few words, this story has a streamlined focus: the characters’ experience of religious participation and their implied value systems. Jeannette, Brad’s wife, is a believing Methodist when they meet as employees at a financial firm in Boston during the early years of the Great Depression. Smitten immediately by her elegance and what modern reader’s might call her spirituality, which is contrasted against the materialism of their colleagues, Brad falls in love. They marry and raise four children together. Updike moves us through the years efficiently, with large amounts of summary and a few key fractional scenes. Unlike Silber or Proulx, however, he deliberately chooses two specific areas of the couple’s life as the lenses through which to portray time passing.
The first is the political situation, exemplified primarily by the current U.S. president. We hear that Roosevelt’s “boasts” about saving the country come true and help drive Brad’s financial success. Then Ike is president, then JFK. President Kennedy’s connection to Roosevelt through his father Joseph is portrayed as a man moving from someone “to gossip about in Boston financial circles” to someone who headed “up the SEC under Roosevelt and his raving liberals.” Brad retires the same summer Nixon resigns, a very sly way of ever so slightly tying Brad’s way of seeing the world to Nixon’s. Within a few paragraphs we’re in the Carter era and the Iranian hostage crisis is being covered on television.
The other aspect of the couple’s life Updike uses to move us through time is Brad and Jeannette’s changing religious habits. While they are still dating, Brad begins attending services with Jeannette. Very soon, though, he convinces her to switch to a church closer to his own house, where he relishes “the emptiness, the chill” and the “pathetic sermons” because he is still, he guesses, an unbeliever. When they move to Newton, a tony Boston suburb, he convinces Jeannette to switch again, this time to the nearby Episcopalian church, supposedly for its proximity, but he admits sotto voce that it “held more of the sort of people they would like to get to know.” Updike also walks us through time by describing the style of different ministers who serve in the couple’s churches, the changing religious attitudes of the couple’s children, and Jeannette and Brad’s own level of church involvement (his increases year by year; hers decreases). Meanwhile, Jeannette takes over a third-floor cupola room in their house as a retreat, where Brad imagines her meditating without knowing quite what that means. After retirement, when he tries to visit her there, he feels alienated and unwanted. These particular facts of their life track the story’s central emotional stakes and are the lens through which each character’s deepest self is revealed. Unlike Silber’s stories, “Made in Heaven” can be neatly mapped over the Freytag pyramid and it offers a clear crisis moment just where one is traditionally expected. Nonetheless, the devastating moment manages to be surprising and credible.
Andrea Barrett takes a very different approach to the long-clock story in “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” which appears in her collection Ship Fever. Unlike “Brokeback Mountain,” Silber’s collection, and Updike’s story, Barrett doesn’t literally carry the reader through years or decades. Instead, she gives a sense of a whole life by relating two conventional short-clock stories layered together, narrated first-person by an American woman of Czech descent. Antonia is not as confessional and direct as Silber’s narrators, though. She holds back, implying and evading, leaving readers to interpret more. The first story Antonia relates is about her grandfather, a Czech immigrant who as a child knew Gregor Mendel, the famous monk who first identified genetic inheritance laws through the propagation of peas. After a harrowing incident that binds Antonia to her grandfather with special closeness, he tells her of Mendel’s betrayal by another scientist and how Mendel’s happiness was affected. In the second story Antonia describes a difficult time in her marriage, when she and her husband struggled with middle age and its disappointments. Both stories could have stood independently and been judged complete narratives, nicely mapping onto Freytag’s pyramid. They could also have appeared as independent stories in a linked collection about Antonia or her family. However, by layering the stories into a single narrative, Barrett allows the stories to speak directly to one another, drawing implicit causes and effects across generations and between two continents that wouldn’t exist if the narratives were separated, even as part of a linked collection.
The fifth author, who should come as no surprise, is Alice Munro. Many of Munro’s stories feature a long clock. “The Progress of Love,” published in her Selected Stories, showcases especially well her many strategies for handling these narratives. Some of the tools are the same as those used in the aforementioned works. Munro layers multiple short-clock stories together, employs the reflective first person narrator, leaps back and forth between time periods via the white space between sections, and uses changes to the character’s physical surroundings to mark the passage of time. Unlike Silber, Proulx and Updike though, and to a much greater extent than Barrett, Munro forgoes chronology, relating events in a quixotic order determined by their connection to one another and the emotional journey on which the writer (or narrator) is taking the reader. She also employs “snapshot” sections, or chunks of text which portray or explore one aspect of a character’s life without relating, either in scene or summary, an actual event.
One way to understand her approach is via Munro’s own explanation: In the collection’s introduction she speaks of her stories as houses. “A story is not like a road to follow, I said, it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the rooms and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished.”
This analogy perfectly speaks to Munro’s achronological structure. Nothing about “The Progress of Love” is linear, and therefore in a sense the story defies the analogy to a clock, yet we absolutely feel carried across many decades.
“The Progress of Love” opens with Euphemia describing the day her father called to tell her that her mother had died. His words and tone carry ambiguity: excitement, apology, amazement, and a “queer sound like a gulped breath.” Yet Euphemia assures us he took her mother’s death hard and never got used to living alone, quickly and willingly moving into a county home for the elderly. In the next section Euphemia tells us about her mother’s religious convictions and habits and gives us a glimpse of her own life as a child, including a few sentences about her parents’ marriage. From there we get sections about the house the narrator grew up in and how she spoke of it to her own children and husband, how her father seemed to feel about Euphemia’s divorce, and a section about her mother’s hair and how much she disliked its resemblance to her own father’s hair. Next we get a section about the narrator’s odd first name. These discrete text sections aren’t summaries as we normally think about them; they don’t take us through story events in a condensed format. They also aren’t scenes, or consequential events, though some feature bits of dialogue and typical or repeating moments like “I used to try to get her to tell what color brown” her hair was. Instead of summaries or scenes, these sections are more like photographs, presenting us with elements of a character’s appearance, relationships or physical circumstances that have emotional importance.
Then, deep in the story, Munro presents us for the first time with an extended, specific period in time, the summer of 1947 when Euphemia was twelve and her Aunt Beryl visited. The set up goes on for three pages, a chunk of text much longer than any preceding section. From this point, the story loops further back in time, to Euphemia’s mother’s childhood. Euphemia relates a detailed story about something that happened to her mother, Marietta, as a young girl. Midway through the incident, the narrative boldly shifts from first-person past to third-person present tense. This rhetorical technique fuses Euphemia with Marietta and reinforces the sense of collapse, or fusion, among time periods in Euphemia’s life. The next section indicates that Marietta told Euphemia this story about her childhood and “sealed it shut” with the assertion that “her heart was broken.” Both Euphemia and the reader are left to make sense of that via the remaining sections of the story.
First we return to the summer of 1947 during Aunt Beryl’s visit, which goes on for the next eight and a half pages, then Euphemia brings the story nearer to the present by describing the eventual sale of her family home (a farm) and the fate of the surrounding properties. The next clear moment in time that is fully dramatized is Euphemia’s visit to her home as a much older adult, when the farm is once again for sale. By now it’s clear that Euphemia’s father has also died, her divorce is far in the past and she is seeing a new man, Bob Marks. While they are in the house, Euphemia tells Bob a version of the story about her mother and her Aunt Beryl that we’ve already heard and the way he reacts to this version becomes a crisis moment. After that, Euphemia returns the reader to 1947, during Aunt Beryl’s visit, where a parallel crisis plays out between Euphemia’s parents, Aunt Beryl and Beryl’s gentleman friend, who becomes implicitly compared to Bob Marks. Finally Euphemia returns to the first crisis moment, with her and Bob Marks standing in her family home, debating the meaning of her parents’ long ago actions.
Whew! Describing such a story demonstrates its complexity if nothing else. Taking up Munro’s own analogy, the story walks us through decades much the same way that walking through a house and examining its contents, the artifacts of many different time periods, can reveal a person’s entire life. A person’s possessions are not arranged chronologically, but rather spatially, based on the value and purpose their owner assigns. This arrangement affects the way an observer, or reader, interprets the objects. Contrary to Forester’s description, Munro’s plot does not become overshadowed by causality. There is connection, to be sure, but a connection that is more like the way rooms and possessions are arranged in a house rather than the way one road leads to another.
Einstein taught us causes and effects are impacted by the observer and time is not what we think it is. It can be short or long. It can be straight or curved. It can speed up or slow down. It can bend back on itself. What these writers teach us is that stories can do the same.
Amy Gustine is the author of the story collection You Should Pity Us Instead (Sarabande Books), which received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist. The New York Times Book Review called her collection an "affecting and wide-ranging debut” and the book appeared on many “best of” lists, including the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Best of 2016: 100 Recommended Books.” Her fiction has also been published in several journals, received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology and been awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2016. Gustine lives in Toledo, Ohio.
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